Sharpe's Opinion
Thursday, 12th Mar, 2009
Got £5000? Then You can Be A Cyber Criminal Too!
The BBC have been building a bot-net.
The technology programme Click has demonstrated just how at risk PCs are of being taken over by hackers. Almost 22,000 computers made up Click’s network of hijacked machines, which has now been disabled. The BBC has now warned users that their PCs are infected, and advised them on how to make their systems more secure.
[…]
Some networks of hijacked computers are of “much more value” than others, according to [Jacques Erasmus from Prevx Security]. “Computers from the US and the UK go for about $350 to $400 (£254-£290) for 1,000 because they’ve got much more financial details, like online banking passwords and credit cards details,” he said.
The programme that this was done for airs on Sunday.
Now, I’m not saying that Macs are intrinsically immune to such attacks, nor that they will keep up their near-perfect safety record forever. What I will say, though, is that using a Mac I have never had cause to worry about using the internet like you do on Windows.
Comments
Hmmm. So my swear filter blocks ‘********’ but leaves ‘bastards’ alone. I think I shall have to make some alterations to the word list.
Linux is also far more secure, yes – but I’m not interested in having to configure my system for myself. Macs ‘just work’, and they’re secure. Double trouble.
We have a separate bank a/c and card, with extremely limited funds for purchases on the internet. Our business stuff is on a non-connected PC; we dismantle and destroy the hard disc from old ones. Data can be recovered from a low-level reformat!
PS Bastard is a legitimate word.
ladytizzy, by destroying a usable hard drive you are potentially depriving somebody of a useful resource. Just run something like DBAN. Even just one pass of overwriting makes data unrecoverable, and anybody who says different either doesn’t understand electromagnetics or is full of bullshit.
Neither have I ever had much cause to worry about stuff on the Internet.
And I’ve not got a Mac, either ….. I’ve got a bunch of PCs built from bog-standard commodity parts that you can pick up anywhere.
I’m just not running Windows on any of them.
You can never make a building secure by ******** on a lock from the outside. And there are so many “legitimate” Windows applications which rely for their normal operation on the very security flaws that are exploited by malware, and would therefore break if those flaws were ever fixed properly, that that is not an option.
AJS
March 12, 2009 at 1:10 pm